MOVIE5 OPENING AMERICAN DES I A romantic comedy about an Indian-American student who rediscovers his Eastern heritage. Written and directed by Piyush Dinker Pandya. Opening March 16. THE DISH A drama about the group of scientists who oper- ated a remote satellite relay station in Australia during the Apollo moon landing. Directed by Rob Sitch. Opening March 14. ENEMY AT THE GATES Jude Law plays Vassilli Zaitsev, a Russian sniper and war hero who helped defend Stalingrad, in this drama directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud. With Ed Harris. Opening March 16. EXIT WOUNDS Andrzej Bartkowiak directed this action pic about an inner-city cop (Steven Seagal) who discovers a web of corruption. With DMX, Isaiah Washing- ton, and Tom Arnold. Opening March 16. MEMENTO Reviewed this week in The Current Cinema. Opening March 16. FILM NOTE5 BEFORE NIGHT FALLS At its best, Julian Schnabel's second film is a mem- oir of easy and raffish good times-the endless summer days at the beginning of the Cuban Rev- olution. Schnabel adapted an autobiographical memoir by the poet and novelist Reinaldo Arenas (Javier Bardem), a homosexual who was initially a participant in the revolution, then a victim of it, and was finally allowed to leave Cuba in 1980. Arenas settled in New York, wrote a great deal, and, suffering from AIDS, committed suicide here in 1990. Schnabel doesn't tell this story coherently: characters appear or disappear without explana- tion, and we don't always know where we are. The method is closer to collage than to Hollywood script construction, but Schnabel works sensually, and that makes up for a lot. Bardem, who has the face of a shy, smiling bull-a prominent nose, hand- some eyes-loosens up his shoulders and elbows and gives d performance of great charm.-David Denby (Reviewed in our issue of 1/8/01.) (Chelsea Cinemas, Empire 25, Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, Park & 86th Street Cinemas, and Quad Cinema.) CHOCOLAT A confectionary fairy tale, photographed in pale- lemon winter light. In France, in 1960, a beautiful and charming woman (Juliette Binoche) and her little girl (Victoire Thivisol) waft into a small town, open a chocolaterie, and provide the un- happy and repressed inhabitants with exactly the kind of bonbons they need to make their troubles go away (the chocolate, laced with an old Mayan powder, acts as an all-purpose elixir). This inspires the hostility of the town's impotent deity, the Comte de Reynaud (Alfred Molina), who rallies the forces of reaction. Lasse Hallström's produc- tion is yet another complacent movie about the free spirits versus the squares; this one commends the audience for favoring such dangerous things as eating, dancing, friendship, sex, and riverboats. J udi Dench, as a grouchy old lady. transcends the syrup.-D.D. (Angelika Film Center, Battery Park 16, Cinema 3rd Avenue, East 86th Street Cinemas, Empire 25, Kips Bay Theatre, Lincoln Square, and Olympia I and II.) THE CRIME OF MONSIEUR LANGE An ode to France's Popular Front and to popular art, this 1935 film has the shape and bittersweet flavor of a modern fable. Lange (René Lefèvre), an aspiring serial writer, slaves for a greedy publisher named Batala (Jules Berry); after Batala is report- edly killed in a train wreck, his employees form a coöperative, and Lange's cowboy creation, Ari- zona Jim, becomes a smash in a photo-and-text format. The greatness of the director, Jean Renoir, and the screenwriter, Jacques Prévert, is best ex- 34 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 19, 2001 '\" ,^O t>Nf) Cí i() {, r ' AtJ oVr;, I , ' jt f. o , 1" 11.1-' 1. o t / g t -- . / , < '#,\ , oQ-.<>I$ .::: ! ( ",:.:,:,:,:,,,/ .... <:.. emplified by the complexity and charm of their vil- lain. Berry's Batala anticipates Peter Sellers' Quilty in "Lolita" in his rapacious wisdom, seductive- ness, and cunning use of disguise. In French.-Mi- chael Sragow (BAM Rose Cinemas; March 19.) CROUCHING TIGER. HIDDEN DRAGON The new Ang Lee film is scripted in Cantonese and Mandarin and set in the China of the early nine- teenth century, although we could be watching a fable from any time in the last millennium, or from no time at all. Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh), probably the least excitable action heroine in mod- ern movies, is given a sword by Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun Fat), for safekeeping. Needless to say, it is soon stolen, and the hunt is on. When pursuing a likely suspect, Mu Bai and Shu Lien tend to take the quickest route, whether it's up a wall, over a roof, across a lake, or, best of all, from tree to tree. They don't fly so much as dance through the air, taking fairy-tale strides. Athletic honors are shared between Yeoh and Zhang Ziyi, who plays a rebel- lious young noblewoman with a fiery past. The outright winner is Ang Lee, who is at once depend- ably stylish and smartly unpredictable.-Anthony Lane (12/11/00) (Angelika Film Center, BAM Rose Cinemas, Battery Park 16, Chelsea Cinemas, 42nd Street E Walk, Kips Bay Theatre, Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, and 64th and 2nd.) THE GARDEN OF THE FINZI-CONTINIS Vittorio De Sica's lyric evocation of a vanished group of people (the cultivated, aristocratic Jewish Italian landowners) and a vanished mood. Based on Gior- gio Bassani's semiautobiographical novel, this 1970 film records how Giorgio, a middle-class outsider (Lino Capolicchio), is drawn into the decaying, en- chanted world of the Finzi-Continis by the impe- rious, contrary Micòl (Dominique Sanda); she and her languid brother (Helmut Berger) are spoiled, beautiful people without the will to save themselves. This extraordinary film, with its melancholy glam- our, is perhaps the only one that records the half- hearted anti-Jewish measures of the Mussolini pe- riod-which were, however, sufficient to wipe OUt the Finzi-Continis and all they represented. In Ital- ian.-Pauline Kael (Symphony Space; March 20.) THE GLEANERS AND I The French filmmaker Agnès Varda, digital camera in hand, roams around her native country record- ing the movements of gleaners. Traditionally, as in the archetypal Millet painting, gleaners were women who gathered the remains of the harvest; their modern counterparts are mostly scavengers, searching in dumpsters and other likely places. The French, of course, give the practice a wonderfully perverse twist-many gleaners do so by choice, dis- dainful of wastefulness and rampant consumerism. Varda's photographic eye is much in evidence, and her narration is both shrewd and whimsical. When she leaves a camera on accidentally, she uses the un- intended footage to create a "dance of the lens cap," a filmic gleaning that acts as a perfect grace note. In French.-Michael Agger (Film Forum.) HANNIBAL Ten years after "The Silence of the Lambs," Han- nibal Lecter returns to the table. He is played, once again, by Anthony Hopkins, who seems both more placid and more particular in his cravings. Lecter is in Florence, where he is suspected by a local de- tective (Giancarlo Giannini, the best and most rum- pled thing in the movie). Also on the trail is Clarice Starling (Julianne Moore), who is now an outcast within the EB.I. Huntress and prey finally meet; indeed, we are given to understand that they can barely keep away from each other. The screenwrit- ers, David Mamet and Steven Zaillian, do a good job of sifting the dross from Thomas Harris's novel, and the director, Ridley Scott, gets elegant value from what remains. The locations are lush, the re- worked ending could not be neater, and the special effects were apparently devised by an abattoir. There's just one problem, and it's insurmountable: this is not a scary movie.-A.L. (2/12/01) (Astor Plaza, Battery Park 16, Chelsea Cinemas, First & 62nd Cinemas, Kips Bay Theatre, Lincoln Square, Metro Cinema I and II, Orpheum VII, Union Square, and Waverly.) THE HOUSE OF MIRTH The evidence suggests that Edith Wharton may be easier and more rewarding to film than Henry James. "The Age of Innocence" returned Martin Scorsese to his old, obsessive form, and now the British director Terence Davies has been inspired to his best work by Wharton's earlier and less elab- orate novel-her first major success, which sold a hundred and forty thousand copies in its first cou- ple of months. Whether moviegoers will match that enthusiasm is hard to tell; there is grace and passion on show here, but they are firmly and gradually sti:. fled. By the film's close, the weight of the wrong done to the heroine, Lily Bart, feels unredeemed. Gillian Anderson lends Bart a fine air of pride and craving. As she spurns the offer of a safe marriage from a property tycoon (Anthony LaPaglia), or of fleshly compromise with the porcine Gus Trenor (Dan Aykroyd), we believe both in her principles and in the certainty öf her doom.-A.L. (12/25/00 & 1/1/01) (Eastside Playhouse and Quad Cinema.) IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE The latest film from the talented young Hong Kong writer-director Wong Kar Wai makes us pant for adultery. In the early sixties, in a community of Shanghai refugees living in Hong Kong, Mrs. Chan (Maggie Cheung) and Mr. Chow (Tony Leung) are next-door neighbors in a friendly apartment build- ing. The perfectly dressed and coiffed couple meet, talk, and realize that their frequently travelling spouses are off having an affair with each other. What to do? The movie is all about sensual antic- ipation. Nat King Cole croons on the soundtrack, and the camera caresses the rain on the streets and the texture of a stone wall in the semi-darkness. So skillfully does the director bring us to a state of breathless expectation that when he refuses to deliver the goods he almost seems to have in- vented a new form of perversion. In Cantonese and French.-D.D. (2/5/01) (Angelika Film Center, BAM Rose Cinemas, Battery Park 16, First & 62nd Cinemas, Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, and Mur- ray Hill Cinemas.) KNIFE IN THE WATER The work of a wunderkind who grew up fast- Roman Polanski made this 1961 film when he was twenty-eight, but it has the low-key wryness and technical assurance you expect from directors twice as old. This sinister, unpredictable fusion of psy- chological drama and unromantic comedy unfolds mostly during a daylong sailboat journey. When a well-off husband and wife (Leon Niemczyk and Jolanta Umecka) take on a student (Zygmunt Mala- nowicz) as a deckhand, sexual tension and mascu- line rivalry add fire to built-in class jealousies. Polan- ski maintains an ultra-modern cool tone; no one leaves the water unscathed. In Polish.-M.S. (Cin- ema Classics; March 14-15.) LAST RESORT A beautifully filmed, moody story about a young Russian mother (Dina Korzun) and son who ar- rive for a ne'N life in London only to be shunted aside into a holding area in a seaside town. In this limbo, she is befriended by an Englishman (Paddy